SPIDER MOUNTAIN Page 15

  Our excursion up the second valley produced six home sites, but only one person, an elderly woman, had been willing to talk to us. The rest either ran us off or wouldn’t come out of their trailers and cabins. When the old lady introduced herself as Laurie May Creigh, I’d been alarmed, but it turned out that Laurie May, although related, had no time for the likes of Grinny Creigh and all her evil works. She’d invited us onto her front porch, offered cold tea and some homemade muffins, and told us she’d be pleased to set a spell and talk. The porch was in shadow as the sun began its late-afternoon arc into the mountains.

  She said she was eighty-and-some years old, and she looked it, although she displayed no visible infirmities beyond the measured movements of that great age. There appeared to be no electricity in the log cabin where she lived, but the place was clean and orderly, with freshly split firewood piled neatly all along the front and side porches and the yard free of the clutter we’d seen at most of the mountain trailers. There were three small outbuildings behind the cabin, one of which contained a dozen chickens. There was a curious circle of dense pines on the slope above the outbuildings. Her cabin was three-quarters of the way up the slope from the one-lane road and overlooked the crashing creek that had created the hollow in the first place. There was one more homestead above hers.

  “ ‘At woman ain’t no damned good,” Laurie May pronounced, banging her cane for emphasis. “We’s kin, you know, but I don’t own to the likes of her. She and that no-good son of hers, that Nathan, they’s the reason folks ‘round here call this hill back yonder Spider Mountain. Real name is Book Mountain. The onliest spider is over yonder in the next holler.”

  “We’ve heard some stories,” Carrie said, trying to make it sound casual. I sat on the front steps with the dogs, while Carrie sat in one of the rockers on the porch. I’d decided to let Carrie do the interview, although the old lady seemed willing enough to talk.

  Laurie May reached under her rocker for a small leather bag, opened drawstrings, and pinched some dipping tobacco into her lower lip. “They call her Grinny Creigh, but her real name’s Vivian. Once her pap passed, she’n her brothers commenced to fussin’ and feudin’ over who was gonna run the ‘shine business in these here parts. Years ago, that was. The brothers turned up dead, all but one, and that’s when folks started callin’ her Grinny. The live one became sheriff down in Rocky Falls, and he’s of a stripe with Vivian.”

  “Who was Nathan’s father?” Carrie asked.

  “Some damn viper snake, spit itself out of a log,” Laurie May said promptly. “That boy is downright crazy.” She spat over the porch rail into a much abused flowerbed. “Goes around with a bag’a knives all the time. Nathan and his bag’a knives, folks say. They’s an old gold mine buried in the hill behind her cabin. All played out, of course, but folks say Nathan does things back in there, and I believe it.”

  “What kind of things?”

  Laurie May spat again. “Ain’t no tellin’,” she replied. “Bad things. Came around here back in the spring, lookin’ for some man ain’t no one ever heered of. I run him off, all right. I called him Dead Eyes right to his face, that’s what folks call him, b’hind his back, mind you. So I told him, I says, you git the hell outta here. Had my Greener right inside the door, and he knew it, too. Him and them damned ugly dogs. Not like these pretty things. Scared my chickens off their layin’ for a whole week.” She pulled an ancient lace handkerchief out of her sleeve and wiped the side of her mouth. “Boy ain’t right,” she said, tapping her own forehead.

  “We’ve heard the Creighs are running more than just moonshine,” Carrie ventured.

  The old lady looked at her over her glasses. “What kinda cops you say you was?” she asked with a sly, toothless grin.

  I laughed out loud. “Told you,” I said. The old lady positively beamed.

  “We’re state police,” Carrie said, pulling out her credentials while finessing my status. “We came up here to talk to people who live around Grinny Creigh and her crowd.”

  “That ain’t gonna happen,” Laurie May snorted. “ ‘Sides me, ain’t nobody livin’ this close to the spider’s gonna say nothin’, if they know what’s good for ’em. That damn Nathan’ll come creepin’ in the night and burn ’em out.”

  “But you’re not afraid of him?” I asked.

  “Lemme tell ye somethin’,” she said. “Once ye get my age? Don’t need much sleep, ‘specially at night. I watch. They know it, too. Any snakes come around here get they rattles shot at. They know that, too. ‘Cain’t hold that big ole Greener like I used to could, but I got me a Colt .44. Come out here in the dark, set down in this here chair, put that thing up on the railing there, I can shoot the nut out of a squirrel’s mouth the long way, if you get my meanin’. Was that y’all they was after last night, all that mess over to the bottom’a Deep Creek?”

  I shook my head in wonder. The hills were indeed alive. “Yes, ma’am,” Carrie said. “We think they faked an accident with a log truck, turned it over right where we were camping.”

  Laurie May nodded. “That’ll be Nathan,” she said. “That’s his style. Fixin’ to mash ye. One night he came a’creepin up behind this old man’s trailer, over to Benson Bluff? He went and sawed him a tree right down on top of that poor man’s trailer. Wasn’t no chain saw, neither. Did it by hand, quiet, sneaky like. Took’m all night, prob’ly. Used him an oiled whip blade, him an’ one other boy. Patient damn snake, that Nathan. Mashed that old man flat. Folks thought they was gonna have to bury the whole trailer to git the job done right.”

  “And the sheriff?” I asked. “Couldn’t he see that it was a murder?”

  Laurie May spat again, and I noticed for the first time she was killing insects every time she spat into the flowerbed. “M. C. Mingo’s a Spider Mountain Creigh. Sees what he’s tole to see, that one does. Folks say Grinny’s got somethin’ on him, b’sides they bein’ brother and sister. He come around here, what, a year ago? Stood right out yonder, giving me what fer ‘bout talkin’ to strangers, like I’m a’doin’ right now. Didn’t figger on my boys bein’ home, did he. No, sir. I got four of’em. Big boys. There’s the twins, and then t’other two. Worked them coal mines, over to Tenn-essee. Coupl’a them gittin’ on, but just the same, they ran his potbellied little ass right off. He don’t come back up thisaway no more, I’ll tell you that.”

  “What about children?” Carrie asked. “I haven’t seen many children at all up here in our travels.”

  Laurie May shook her head. “Mostly old folks up here these days,” she said. “Ain’t no work, no money ‘cept the welfare. Young’ns around here, they pack up to town or one of them cities back east.” She paused as if trying to remember something. “Folks do say they’s a lot of children who flat run off in these here parts. Cain’t blame ’em if they do. ‘Specially if you see some of them mamas. No-good sluts and hoors, the lot of’em. Go ‘round with hardly no clothes on, then act all s’prised when they get a baby stuck on ’em, like they don’t know wherever did it come from.”

  She stopped talking when we heard a truck engine drop into a low gear at the foot of the valley and begin climbing the dirt lane that paralleled the creek. Then we heard a second vehicle do the same thing.

  “Y’all be gettin’ inside, now,” she said urgently, rocking herself up and out of her chair. “And bring them dogs, mister.”

  We went into the cabin, which was as neat and clean as the yard. I noted the antique double-barreled shotgun lodged near the front door. Its twin stood by the back door in the kitchen. Laurie May took us over to what turned out to be the pantry door and opened it. She motioned for me to get my fingers into a hole in the floor and then lift a five-foot-long trapdoor. She gave us a lantern and a match and told us to hide out down in the cellar until whoever it was went away. She passed the backdoor shotgun to me as Carrie went down the steps. Then she went back out onto the front porch.

  I wedged the door open and lit the lantern. I pulled out the DEA radio, called
Greenberg’s radioman up on the mountain, and told them we were going into hiding in case whoever was coming was the Creigh gang. I described the location of the cabin and then shut it down when Laurie May stepped back into the kitchen and said to hurry, they was almost here. We went down the wooden stairs and I lowered the trapdoor. We could hear her slithering a carpet over the trapdoor and then walking back toward the cabin’s front door, her cane counting time.

  “There’s a reason they call it a trapdoor,” I said nervously. “If she’s one of them …”

  “I don’t think so,” Carrie said. She took the lantern and looked around. The cellar walls were made of stone, and the floor was packed earth. The shelves along one wall were filled with Mason jars of preserved foods, sacks of flour and sugar, and store-bought canned goods. There were a dozen burlap sacks of lump coal stacked along another wall; a third wall held all kinds of antique kitchen implements, soap, candles, and three more lanterns. There was a kitchen table and three wooden chairs out in the middle of the cellar. The air smelled of chalky dust and old stone. It certainly could have been a trap—there was no other way out of the cellar other than those oak steps. The shepherds sat down next to the steps and watched the shadows being thrown along the walls by the kerosene lantern.

  “Why did you ask her about children?” I asked, easing myself into one the chairs. A fine halo of dust rose from the table when I sat down. We couldn’t hear anything from the outside.

  “We’ve seen a dozen or so places in two days, and exactly one two-year-old child,” she replied.

  “There could have been more,” I said. “The people who didn’t come out, or the ones who told us to get gone—there could have been kids in those places.”

  “Then there should have been toys, trikes, big-wheels, swings—kid clutter. I didn’t see any, except at that one place.”

  “Well, like she said—there’s no future in these hills for young people, and it’s the young people who have kids. They go to town or just plain away. Makes sense.”

  Carrie sat down. “That makes sense for teenagers—I’m talking kids. Four-to ten-year-olds. There’s one combined elementary and middle school and one high school in this county, all in Rocky Falls. They combined the elementary and the middle school three years ago because the elementary school didn’t have enough new accessions to warrant keeping it open.”

  “The overall population dropping?”

  “Not much change really, and that’s part of the mystery. Now, the county people do admit they have some ‘data holes’ in the higher elevations.”

  “Probably more like bullet holes in their county vehicles,” I said. We heard a door close upstairs, and then Laurie May was tapping on the trapdoor with her cane. I went up the stairs and pushed the door open.

  “They done gone,” she announced. “But they was a’lookin’ for ye, all right. Nathan and his boys. I told ’em you and the lady done been here. Told ’em you said y’all was headed for Spider Mountain. That put ’em right off they feed, that did.”

  “They say what they were going to do?” I asked.

  “Heard one say they was gonna go get the dogs, put a track on ye. Best leave now, and don’t go nowheres near Grinny Creigh.”

  “We’re going to go right up to the top of this valley, and then we’ll probably head out,” I said. “I’ve seen that dog pack.”

  “Ain’t we all,” Laurie May said. “But Mr. Samuel Colt works on dogs, same as men.”

  “Thank you for speaking to us,” Carrie said.

  “Most folks up here is decent folks,” the old lady said. “But not on Spider Mountain. Folks knows, but they skeered.”

  “That’s why we’re here, Ms. Creigh,” Carrie said. “We want to fix that problem real bad.”

  The old lady nodded. “ ‘Bout time,” she said. “Folks been a’wonderin’.”

  Baby Greenberg took a sip of coffee from a metal cup, winced, and threw the remainder of the coffee into the fire. “Goddammit, Rupe,” he said, “if I wanted asphalt I’d have asked for some.”

  Special Agent Rupert Jones shrugged his overlarge shoulders. “Never said I could make coffee,” he said. “Don’t drink that shit, myself.” Then he and one of the other agents left to take up their night watch positions on the slopes above Crown Lake. The other two agents had already rolled into their bags.

  We were gathered around what was technically an illegal campfire on the edge of Crown Lake. The duty radioman had picked us up at the top of the valley after we’d left Laurie May’s and driven us down the firebreaks to the DEA campsite. Dinner had consisted of cold pizza from Marionburg, courtesy of the agent who’d driven the lower valley road to see about the logging-truck accident. The logs had all still been down in the creek, but there’d been no sign of the truck or trailer.

  “If you were a truly special agent,” I said, “you’d have some scotch in one of those briefcases over there.”

  “Why, is your flask empty?” Carrie asked innocently.

  “Very,” I said, making a mental note to get her for that.

  “Well,” Greenberg said. “In fact…”

  He got up and returned with a bottle, which duly made the rounds. My shepherds were curled up close to the fire. Once the three of us had properly equipped ourselves against the rapidly cooling mountain air, Greenberg threw another log on the fire and asked the essential question. “So: Now what’re you gonna do?”

  “I think we’ve established that this is definitely Injun country,” I said.

  “Gosh, you think?” he asked.

  “With a damned good intel and surveillance network,” Carrie said. “They knew we were up there and where we’d settled for the night. And they had no qualms about squashing their problem.”

  “So we have grounds for taking action,” I said. “But even if you guys came in force, swept up all the black hats you could find, including Grinny and Nathan, would you have a case for court?”

  We all knew the answer to that question.

  “How about the old lady?” Greenberg asked. “Could she point us toward some concrete evidence?”

  “I don’t think so,” Carrie said. “She knows what’s going on and who’s who in the zoo, but I doubt she ever comes off that place. Apparently she has sons who see to her needs.”

  “She said there are lots of decent people living up there alongside the Creigh nest, but what she’s doing doesn’t really affect them,” I said. “And according to Laurie May, if they do poke their nose in where it doesn’t belong, big trees fall on their cabins at night.”

  “Shit,” Greenberg sighed. “We’re nowhere. Again.”

  “I say you all quit creeping around the hills, playing their game, and take a federal crew into Grinny’s place, have a look at that abandoned mine that’s supposed to be under her cabin. I recognized Nathan as being in charge of what happened last night, so there’s probable cause.”

  “They’d say it was an accident with a logging truck,” Greenberg pointed out. “Shit happens. The guy who came across the creek looking for you was only checking for possible victims.”

  “With his shotgun? And with all the logs in the creek?”

  “You know and I know, but think what a lawyer could do with that in front of a judge who may or may not love the government and all its works. I mean, that applies both before and after any search. I’d hate to find a ton of evidence at Grinny’s only to lose it because the search gets tossed.”

  Greenberg’s radio crackled into life. “Incoming,” reported one of the agents on the hill.

  “How many?” Greenberg asked.

  “One vehicle. Stand by.” Then he came back. “Looks like a sheriff’s patrol car.”

  “Ours or theirs?” I wondered aloud.

  By then we could hear a vehicle approaching along the shoreside dirt road. Its headlights pitched bizarre shadows on the boulder piles just above us.

  “Some ranger coming to check out the fire inside the park grounds, maybe?” Carrie asked. Greenb
erg groaned.

  The vehicle stopped about a hundred yards away. Its headlights switched off and a single individual got out, flipped on a flashlight, and started walking toward the fire. The shepherds were up and alert; I ordered them to sit down as M. C. Mingo himself stepped down the bank and into the firelight. He was in uniform and had his right hand on his gun butt. He turned off the flashlight, stared at me for a long moment, ignoring Carrie, and then addressed himself to Greenberg.

  “You’re Special Agent Greenberg?” he asked.

  “That’s right.”

  “And who are you, miss?”

  Carrie didn’t answer him. She sat back in her folding camp chair and gave him a bored look. I noticed that her right hand had drifted down to the side of her chair, where the Mamba stick was perched. I’d taken my SIG off earlier and put it in my tent with the rest of my gear.

  “And who might you be?” Greenberg asked.

  “You know damn well who I am, and so does this suspect over here. Why haven’t you turned yourself in, Mister Richter?”

  “Waiting for a warrant, Sheriff,” I said. “Sheriff Hayes knows where I am, and then, of course, we’re going to want an extradition hearing. In front of a real judge, even.”

  Mingo glared at me, then at Greenberg. “What are you people doing up here? You’re DEA agents. Why wasn’t this coordinated with my office?”

  “I believe we’re in the national park,” Greenberg said, looking around innocently.

  “Not all the time,” Mingo said. He was tapping the flashlight against his right palm impatiently.

  “Yes, all the time,” Greenberg said. “Haven’t strayed from the park since we’ve been here.” His tone of voice was faintly mocking, and I could see that Mingo’s temper was rising. The flashlight tapping became more intense, and the light actually switched on.

  “You’re required by your own regulations to inform local law enforcement whenever you’re going to conduct an operation. Why wasn’t this done?”